Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Hill liked to say that he turned Todd’s dramatic program over to Orson to get the youth out of his hair. Welles liked to say he did so much in so many plays to capture Skipper’s attention. But Orson was a godsend, a self-starter, and Hill delegated more and more responsibility to him as the school year wore on. Hill was still listed as director of the all-school plays, but his actual involvement tapered off.

  Naturally, as Orson immersed himself in dramatics, his grades suffered, especially in the subjects that didn’t come naturally to him. Here again the headmaster was complicit, encouraging Orson to befriend his classmate Paul Guggenheim, whom Hill regarded as “the other genius” in the same age bracket. Hill then looked the other way when Orson paid Guggenheim for assistance with Latin declensions and geometry. Orson was proud of his lifelong resistance to mathematics, and his spelling also stayed weak. But these weaknesses would not be reflected in his Todd School grades.

  Orson’s schedule was brutal, and by Christmas he had run himself down and developed a bad cold. His father was still away, so Orson headed to Bernstein’s house in Highland Park, where the doctor was spending the holiday with his new wife, the opera diva Edith Mason.

  Their marriage was fast combusting. At first the newlyweds had shuttled between Bernstein’s modest flat and Mason’s luxurious Lake Shore Drive apartment. Yet Mason’s ex-husband, Giorgio Polacco, dogged their every move—calling to talk to her, turning up to visit, sitting down and refusing to leave. Orson still visited Bernstein on his many trips to Chicago, but now those visits were unsettling, with the three adults always quarreling. Court records prove the truth of this anecdote: Polacco carried a gun, and at one point he showed up and waved it around, threatening to shoot the couple and himself—until Mason grabbed the gun and threatened to kill herself first.

  Orson’s presence stirred up other layers of complexity. Polacco was sexually omnivorous, according to Barbara Leaming, and lusted after Orson, always trying to “touch” the teenager when no one was looking.

  Orson admired Edith Mason’s singing, but she was no fan of his. When he arrived in Highland Park, the opera star was greatly “upset” by his cold, according to Chicago newspapers, because she herself “recently had recovered from a cold” and did not want to risk a relapse. When Dr. Bernstein refused to find Orson somewhere else to stay, Mason stormed off, taking a suite at the Belden-Stratford apartments in the city. When reporters got wind of the contretemps and asked Bernstein whether he and the diva had separated permanently, the doctor insisted that he was spending Christmas in the suburbs for peace and quiet. “I visit my wife and see her often,” he insisted. “I am very much in love with her, and I think she still is in love with me.” But the marriage never recovered, and within months Mason had filed for divorce.

  The case took a year and a half to resolve, with Mason leaving the Civic Opera and taking up residence in Dallas, Texas. The divorce proceedings painted “a strange marital mosaic,” according to the Chicago Herald and Examiner, with a “curious roundelay of charges and countercharges.” Mason claimed that the doctor “set about deliberately to obtain money from me, to live off my income, and to spend my income,” even borrowing $1,000 from her to buy her a diamond wedding ring. Bernstein countered her charges with a five-thousand-word deposition that presented Polacco as the “arch conspirator against his marital happiness,” according to the press, turning up incessantly on their doorstep, threatening their lives, trying to extort $100,000 from Bernstein to compensate him for the loss of his beloved wife and daughter. Polacco even warned Bernstein that Mason was getting fat, urging the doctor to put her on a diet and curtail her smoking, which was ruining her glorious voice. Bernstein attested that Mason had her own faults: she was “extravagant in behalf of herself,” according to the Herald and Examiner’s account of his deposition, “citing as one example her possession of 100 pairs of shoes.”

  After the divorce came through, Mason reconciled with Polacco, remarrying him later in 1931, then divorcing him again six years later. The enigmatic doctor, meanwhile, had added a second failed marriage to his own scorecard.

  Where was Dick Welles throughout this soap opera? Was he traveling constantly for pleasure in the Caribbean, as some accounts suggest? Was he visiting his son Richard in Kankakee? Is it possible that Dick was ill, even in a hospital for tests, without Orson’s knowing?

  According to Peter Noble’s biography, relying heavily on information from Dr. Bernstein, Dick Welles retired from business after his wife’s death and devoted himself “to enjoying a life of leisure and travel,” with his son as his “constant companion.” Barbara Leaming’s biography expanded on this travelogue and gave Dick an ulterior motive. “Expressly to steal him away from Dr. Bernstein,” wrote Leaming, “Dick took Orson on far-flung travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia.” Orson insisted in multiple interviews that his father even lived in China for long spells.

  But this appears to be more fantasy than memory. Though available records are admittedly partial, they indicate that after his wife’s death Dick Welles rarely traveled outside the United States, apart from his customary vacations in the Caribbean. His two documented trips to Europe were his 1925 excursion with Dudley Crafts Watson’s tour group, which included Dr. Bernstein, and his trip to meet Orson in Berlin in the late summer of 1928.

  In the summer of 1930, however—in honor of Orson’s fifteenth birthday, and perhaps for other reasons—Dick Welles proposed a long voyage to the Far East.

  That spring, Orson and Roger Hill cowrote a joke-laden musical revue, Troupers’ Trifles of 1930, which was performed at Roger’s Hall for the student body, then reprised at the Woman’s Club and the Woodstock Opera House before touring to a few North Shore towns. Orson designed the costumes, the lighting, and the sets; played the lead role; and, for the first time, officially shared directing credit with the headmaster. After attending a performance of Troupers’ Trifles, Dick Welles unveiled his plans: in early July, he and Orson would leave by train for Seattle, where they would embark on a boat for Japan and China.

  For a young man already fascinated with the Orient, it was a dream trip. Orson arranged to resurrect his Highland Park News column as a kind of travel diary, complete with a new title, “Inklings,” and his own ink-sketched logo.

  His first dispatch came from on board the twenty-thousand-ton Korea Maru, off the shore of Victoria, Vancouver Island, in British Columbia. “Gissing would terminate his feverish search for ‘where the blue begins’ were he here now, for this is where the blue ends,” Orson reported ecstatically, “the sky being considerably faded with the heat.”8

  It would take the Korea Maru a few weeks to cross the Pacific. After anchoring briefly in Honolulu and Manila, the vessel reached Japan in late July. Orson gave one account of the crossing in his column, and another later on at a Woodstock speaking engagement; both lighthearted, they formed the basis of accounts of the trip in the earliest books about Welles. Not until Welles retold the story to Barbara Leaming, many years later, did a darker narrative emerge. This tale, supported by Orson’s private letters from the time, was colored with anguish.

  At first, Orson busied himself aboard ship writing a prospective radio script featuring Sherlock Holmes. As the filmmaker later recalled, he began to notice that his father was sleeping through most of the days on board. Forced to fend for himself, Orson whiled away the hours signing chits at the bar “for everybody on the ship,” as Peter Noble wrote, quoting Welles. “I was certainly popular on that voyage, and the pile of signed chits grew into an enormous heap. My poor father, who knew nothing about my chit-signing, was obliged to settle up a huge bill when the ship landed in China, gave me his first and only lecture—on the value of money.

  “I am afraid that it had very little effect on me.”

  According to Leaming, Dick Welles spent the voyage repeatedly drinking himself into a “stupor” and once was “drunk enough to lose his trousers” before shocked witnesses on the ship. He made Orson his errand boy,
tasked with keeping his father supplied with all the alcohol he could consume. The young man, now fifteen, wrote to the Hills in misery, saying he only wished his father could “find a drink that wouldn’t make him sick.” Worse yet, Dick grew furious when he realized that Orson was picking up drinks for himself as he raced to the bar to replenish his father’s glass, and warned the boy that no member of the Welles family had started out on the road to alcoholism at such a tender age. “There was considerable tension” between Orson and his father, Leaming wrote. “Dick made no bones about being terribly disappointed with Orson, who, he kept sadly repeating, had passed from him.”

  Stopping in Tokyo, they gazed upon Frank Lloyd Wright’s recent Imperial Hotel (“typically Wright with long, horizontal lines and very handsome,” Orson reported in the Highland Park News), then docked in the ancient capital, Nara. “Picturesque and lovely, one of the most beautiful spots in Japanese Japan and particularly so in the rain,” Orson said in his second “Inklings” column. “It started to sprinkle just as we left the station in our rickshaw and increased in violence as we rode. There was a thin green mist hanging over everything as we went scurrying through a kind of three dimensional Japanese print, rattling over little lacquered bridges across willow-bordered streams under huge pines as old as time itself, crunching across temple yards, past age-old pagodas, and on up the hill to our hotel.”

  After the rain stopped, he left “our Dad to snooze under mosquito netting” and stepped outside, venturing into a park where he encountered a traveling theatrical troupe. “In the park we found an open space,” Orson wrote, “in the center of which was a gayly-curtained platform. We guessed correctly that it was a temporary stage erected by some company of strolling players. We parted the drapes and peered in. The actors were clustered about a tiny stove eating their supper. They invited us to join in with them and of course we accepted.”

  Seated in “the only chair” and presented with chopsticks, at which he was already evidently proficient, Orson proceeded to get “stuffed with rice, raw fish, and ‘saki.’ And while even our Japanese was more extensive than their English we carried on a successful conversation of three hours duration—entirely with our hands. We taught them a song from a school musical comedy and they instructed us in the art of Oriental theatrical fencing and make-up.9

  “It was a truly fascinating experience.

  “Late that afternoon we left, promising to return to their show in the evening.”

  Father and son returned when darkness fell. “We found ourselves alone in the park” with the troupe, Orson continued, the show drawing a sparse crowd. “The moving picture industry is hitting the theatrical world even in the East, and it was raining a little. The players laughed long and heartily, and we had tea. We were shocked by their living conditions, their poverty. They told us that they had enough rice for one more day, if no one came the next night. . . . They felt hurt when we offered them money and laughed at our sympathizing. They would laugh at death. We said good-bye and the last thing we heard as we walked down the road was the sound of their merry voices singing the American song we had taught them.”

  In China, the two toured more widely, making a memorable visit to the Great Wall near Peking. Whether Dick Welles accompanied Orson on all the side trips is unclear, but Dick must have traveled on land with his teenage son when great distances were covered.

  In a conversation with his daughter Chris Welles Feder, however, Orson implied that he was alone at least one day, probably in Shanghai, when he wandered into a Chinese opera. “I’ll never forget the elaborate costumes, the masks, the revolving stages,” he told her. He would evoke that moment in The Lady from Shanghai, the 1948 film in which a sailor (played by Welles), framed for a murder, hides in a Chinatown theater in San Francisco as Betty Leong and the Mandarin Theatre enact a masque onstage.

  As the boat turned back toward America, Dick Welles reverted to sleeping through the days. For the rest of his life, Orson believed that his father was sleeping off his alcoholism, and other biographies accept this conclusion. But there may be more sympathetic explanations. Dick Welles’s heart condition had not gone away, and besides his gin and tonics he may well have been taking digitalis, then a popular treatment for heart disease. Digitalis retarded the swelling of body tissue and stimulated normal heart rhythms, and it was often prescribed in combination with lengthy bed rest; for this reason, people with heart disease often took ocean cruises. Digitalis was a difficult substance to prescribe in an accurate dosage, and its effects were notoriously erratic.

  One voice that is absent from all this speculation is that of Dick Welles himself. He left no correspondence or other written record of his life. He may have known he was gravely ill; after discussing the trip with Orson, Barbara Leaming wrote that Dick Welles expressed a fear “of dying in the Orient.” At one point during the voyage, far from home, Dick Welles made his son promise “he wouldn’t be buried in the ground,” i.e., on foreign soil. He made Orson vow to have him cremated or buried at sea if he should die during the trip.

  Orson returned from his summer in Japan and China rattled by the “terrifying journey” he had undergone with his drink-addled father. Barbara Leaming wrote that the boy complained privately to Roger and Hortense Hill about the voyage, and the Hills “made him vow not to see his father again until he had sobered up.” Orson “bluntly” passed on that ultimatum to Dick Welles. “That was the last I ever saw of him,” Welles told Leaming.

  But when, exactly, was that blunt face-off? The first important production of the 1929–1930 season at Todd was George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, a large undertaking featuring forty dramatis personae—mostly Junior Troupers (underclassmen) but also members of the Society of Learn Pidgins (the youngest Todd boys), all of it “staged by Orson Welles,” his first credit as sole director. And Dick Welles was there to see the show.

  Androcles was a typical Todd School shoestring operation—the school never had adequate resources for proper costumes, sets, or even rehearsals. Of course the casting was catch-as-catch-can too, and Orson learned to appreciate the Todd footballers who could act, such as John Dexter; William Mowry Jr., who later followed Orson into the Mercury Theatre; and the ordinary-seeming Edgerton Paul, who played Androcles in this production, and who always underwent an impressive transformation onstage. Orson directed Paul in key roles at Todd before he too joined the Mercury. “A funny little fellow,” Orson mused years later, “with acne and unfortunate in every way but he kind of cast all that aside when he got into makeup and costumes.”

  Todd productions encouraged Orson’s habit of directing as though trapped in the eye of a storm, herding his fledgling actors, shouting at them, driving them fiercely toward the cliff’s edge. “If you had a lead, you did exactly as you were told” by Orson, remembered Hascy Tarbox, then a Junior Trouper. “He choreographed everything. ‘That’s your mark. Don’t move. Don’t wriggle.’ He was a martinet. The result was extraordinary theatre.” Dexter concurred: “Keep it moving!” was Orson’s credo, he remembered. Yet when necessary, Orson was also insightful and nurturing: “He would stop and explain to one and all the plot, the feeling he wanted, the mood, the speed, etc. How he knew it I don’t know.”

  As was his wont, Orson took a plum role himself in Androcles, doubling as the brutish warrior Ferrovius, whom Androcles describes as having “the strength of an elephant and the temper of a raving bull.” He even designed and wrote the production’s program, including an amusing discourse on the import of the play: “A mystery surrounds the author of this delightful satire. Just what is Bernard Shaw, vegetarian, socialist, anti-vivisectionist and Irishman, really driving at?”

  Roger’s Hall filled up with parents and townies, many of them drawn by Orson’s growing reputation. Among them was Dick Welles, who arrived by train from Chicago. Was it here and now, at Androcles and the Lion, that Orson cornered his father and told him to stay away? Or did he write his father a letter and later dodge Dick’s teleph
one calls?

  Leaming and Callow agree that practically everyone in the school knew that Orson’s father was an alcoholic. “His father would come out to see almost every play that we would do,” Hill said, “but he would go into the back seat and he’d sit there silently and he’d probably leave just before the end.” Dick Welles was “usually pretty heavily cocked with alcohol,” the headmaster recalled. “According to Paul Guggenheim,” Callow wrote, without quoting Guggenheim directly, Orson “hated” his father and made himself scarce whenever Dick Welles showed up at Todd for his performances. “His drunkenness was impossible to ignore,” Callow explained, “an unbearable embarrassment in front of his fellow students.”

  But was it really so surprising that a father would leave a school play quickly, as the curtain fell, if his son had warned him away? If he thought his presence was embarrassing his son, or if he was reluctant to reveal his own deteriorating health?

  Just a week after Androcles and the Lion, Orson stopped in at the Tavern Club after a Saturday matinee of Fritz Leiber’s company performing Julius Caesar. According to Ashton Stevens in his “A Column or Less” for the Herald-Examiner, Orson came looking for “either his guardian, the distinguished Dr. Bernstein, or the doctor’s playmates, the childless but children-loving Ned Moores.” When neither could be found, Orson sat down alone and ordered a meal. “Too young to be a member of the Tavern, and too prosperous looking to be a dinner-snatcher, he caused considerable speculation,” Stevens wrote. But the headwaiter vouched for the boy: “Why, that young gentleman’s all right,” the headwaiter reportedly said. “He’s the only son of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Moore.”

  Callow pitied “poor Dick Welles, if he was able to read the piece,” with its references to Bernstein as Orson’s guardian and the boy himself “as another man’s son.” Yet Stevens was obviously kidding; as an old friend of Dick Welles, he knew full well who Orson’s real father was; and the headwaiter was quoted as part of the joke. Stevens went on to praise Orson’s self-assurance, predicting that the youth would become “my favorite actor” someday, though he had “yet to see him act.” He vowed to file the column away, betting that Orson would be “at least a leading man by the time it has yellowed.”